Posted 24 April 2010 - 05:36 AM

scooty

InsanelyMac Protégé

Members

9 posts

My Apple wired slim aluminum keyboard (model A1243) recently had several keys cease functioning due to me spilling water on it. It worked excellently with my MacBook as well as with my Hackintosh. I went to the store, found that they had some of the newer wired models without keypad (model A1242) on sale, and decided to buy one. I figured the tiny ones weren't that different from the ones with the keypads...

It has no problems on my MacBook running Snow Leopard 10.6.2. However, my Hackintosh (running 10.5.4, currently don't have the time to go through the procedure of updating it to a newer version of 10.5 or 10.6) doesn't recognize the layout completely properly. It does not recognize the actual layout of the F* keys, but uses the older layout where keys F9-F11 control Exposé, and F12 opens the Dashboard. This keyboard has F3 Exposé, F4 Dashboard, F7-F9 control iTunes or other media app, F10-F12 control sound volume (as with my older aluminum keyboard, where these keys worked completely fine.) Additionally, the "fn" key doesn't work right all the time: eg I have no page up/down function as I do on my Macbook (via fn+up or fn+down).

I figure that this is most likely due to newer keyboard models requiring some sort of OS update to be properly recognized by OS X. This keyboard was released in 2009 with some of the newer iMac models, and my version of OS X predates the keyboard.

So I have a couple of questions:
1.) Is it possible to make OS X properly recognize this keyboard (or otherwise make it function as it should) without updating to a newer version? Or what part of OS X deals with this sort of thing? Would it be possible to modify something (like a kext dealing with USB/input devices?) in order to make it be recognized?
2.) Why is it that on a Mac with the "newer" keyboard layout (F3 Exposé, F4 Dashboard, and etc) the keyboard shortcuts still show as the "older" layout in the Control Panel? For instance, on my MacBook or a Mac with the slim keyboard, Contorl Panel will show that F9 activates Exposé and F12 activates Dashboard. This is inconsistent with the actual function of the keyboard...F3 activates Exposé and F4 activates Dashboard.